2/10/2009 @ 1:20PM

The Other India

Imagine a scholar with a deep commitment to the U.S., writing a book on American political culture based entirely on the liberal chatter of a rarefied Manhattan subset. Such a work may well offer rich insights into the mentalities of an influential component of the American establishment but would be seriously deficient in its portrayal and understanding of the U.S. in its entirety. The differences between Blue America and Red America, between the salons of Upper East Side and the Rotary Clubs of Houston, and between Maureen Dowd and Rush Limbaugh are profound. Rubbishing one lot on account of conflicting political and aesthetic sensibilities makes for good polemics. But it also renders a very partial view of a complex mosaic.

Professor Martha Nussbaum’s deep interest and even affection for India and concern for its future is undeniable. She has collaborated with the economist and Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, been influenced by his mother Amita Sen and, through her, the universal humanism of Rabindranath Tagore, and has struck up a rapport with the Bengali intelligentsia in the Marxist-ruled city of Calcutta. Her India has been molded by the shared assumptions of India’s “progressive” elite, who have played a decisive role in promoting the liberal socialism of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

There are, however, other Indias impatient with the Nehruvian order and the Congress Party. The most important of these is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-inspired Hindu nationalism that was bred on three impulses: the threat of Islamic extremism, a distorted secularism that resembles the political correctness of the liberal West and the rise of an assertive entrepreneurial class following the dismantlement of an over-regulated economy after 1991. Beginning from the fringe, the BJP gradually increased its electoral clout after 1989 and ended up ruling India in a coalition with some regional parties from 1998 to 2004. The BJP lost the 2004 election narrowly but still controls many provincial governments. If the global economic meltdown takes a political toll in India’s national election, the BJP may be back at the helm in May, 2009.

In her new book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence and India’s Future, it seems that Nussbaum is unfamiliar with the political culture of the BJP. She doesn’t normally engage with BJP politicians and the party’s strategists. She is also unfamiliar with the local cultures of, say, Gujarat, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh–provinces where the BJP is dominant. Her social world in India centers on English-speaking academics and scholars who regard the BJP with the same disdain American liberals reserved for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seeing it as narrow-minded, bigoted, conservative and provincial. Nussbaum’s Indian elites go a step further, even denouncing the BJP as fascist.

The sectarian killings in the state of Gujarat in 2002 bolstered this view of the BJP. Nearly 2,000 people, a majority of them Muslim, died in four days of bloodletting. Human rights activists, the English-language media, the left and the Congress Party blamed Hindu nationalists and particularly the BJP Chief Minister Narendra Modi for orchestrating the “pogrom.” According to Nussbaum, Modi “rationalized and even encouraged the murders.” In 2005, the U.S. government denied Modi a visa for allegedly violating religious freedom.

Ironically, the ferocity of the indignation offended Gujarat’s regional pride and led to Modi being voted back to power quite decisively in 2002 and 2007. With a reputation for being incorruptible, decisive, pro-development and pro-business, Modi is seen by many as a future prime minister of India–a suggestion that makes the liberal establishment recoil in horror.

For Nussbaum, “Muslims in Gujarat today are in a position very similar to that of African Americans in the 1950s South.” There is little in the book to show Nussbaum ever visited Gujarat. But a commission to inquire into the condition of India’s minorities found that Muslims in Gujarat are better educated and have a higher standard of living than their co-religionists in, say, West Bengal–a state Nussbaum is very familiar with.

Nussbaum, it would seem, has a penchant for overstating her case. To her, the Modi phenomenon and Hindu nationalism are dangerous. “What has been happening in India,” she writes, “is a threat to the future of democracy in the world.” Arguing that the international community should have considered economic sanctions against India for the Gujarat killings, she contests the belief that Hindu nationalism, which preceded 9/11, is essentially a reaction to the rise of Islamism: “Few know that the Muslims of Bangladesh and the … 13% of India’s citizens who are Muslims have no ties to international Islamic radicalism or to terrorist organizations … Islamic fundamentalism has no grip in India, despite discrimination and even persecution …”

Nussbaum’s sweeping certitudes make up with audacity what they lack in empirical rigor. While the radicalization of Indian Muslims is nowhere at the level of neighboring Pakistan, there is alarm within the present government at the extent to which jihadi organizations, some with al-Qaida links, have made inroads in India and organized a wave of urban bombings that began in 2005. There is equal concern that many of these groups have been operating from safe havens in Bangladesh–where an indigenous Islam is slowly being overwhelmed by a more austere and doctrinaire version of the faith. Nussbaum’s unwillingness to recognize this disconcerting reality is bewildering but symptomatic of the mood of denial among many liberals.

This is not to suggest that all her misgivings about Hindu nationalism are unfounded. The most compelling section of this book is Nussbaum’s indictment of all Indian governments for devaluing the humanistic and creative dimensions of education for a soulless emphasis on technology alone. Her observations on the poor quality and indifferent pedagogy of Hindu revisionist history, particularly when compared to Marxist and liberal readings of the past, are valid. But she again goes overboard with the argument that “we should not concede that the ethical values promoted by the Hindutva [Hindu nationalist] narrative are normatively equivalent to the values implicit in the Nehruvian account …” Hindu nationalists must remain outliers in a closed establishment dominated by people with whom Nussbaum is at ease.

Backing her contention that “Hindutva history is not respectable” is her impatience with the poor quality of English prose used by those she disagrees with. She mocks the howlers in some hastily introduced textbooks and despairs at the indifferent composition skills of those Supreme Court judges who found nothing unconstitutional in the previous government’s education policy. At the same time, she commends the “outstanding English” of Lalu Yadav, a crafty politician who hates the BJP and loves playing the rustic buffoon to gullible bleeding hearts. This certificate of English language proficiency issued to Lalu is a clincher. Nussbaum is either willfully blinkered or bases her conclusion on unreliable secondary sources.

Nussbaum’s fierce sense of certitude leads her to the belief that those who harbor other points of view are, by and large, unworthy of liberal generosity. She is impressed by Arun Shourie, an American-trained economist and former World Bank functionary who served in the previous BJP government with distinction. “[T]his was a man who lives in my world,” she writes, oozing condescension, “and could in principle even be a friend.” Yet, she detects “something volatile and emotionally violent in his character … something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it may not be a threat.” It’s a prescient set of observations, except that it may be equally applicable to the author.

This is a book that does this distinguished philosopher’s reputation a grave injustice. After last November’s devastating terrorist attack in Mumbai, the big “threat to democracy,” at least in India, may well come from those whose very existence Nussbaum has denied.

Swapan Dasgupta, a political columnist based in New Delhi, can be reached at swapan55@gmail.com.